Also not a joke: XFCE on 39Mb

And no, your popped eyeballs do not deceive you: That is an XFCE desktop with the standard array of controls and gizmos, running on an astounding 39Mb of space.

Very little in the way of outside software is installed, but only htop is running. Plus scrot and xfce4-terminal, of course. 🙂

Not Debian this time — although Debian could probably put up a fight when compared to this. No, this time it’s Alpine Linux, which you may or may not have heard of. Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t.

As I understand it this is intended for embedded systems, which might be part of the reason why I hadn’t run across it sooner.

With much of the distro anchored in uClibc and BusyBox, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the desktop needs a paltry 39Mb to get started.

Having said that, actually putting this into place took a little effort, if typing a few commands can be called effort. Arch users will think it trivial; Ubuntu users will develop a look of shock and fear on their faces. 😉

There is (was?) a skeletal tutorial on the Alpine Linux web site that got me started. I did run into a few obstacles.

After you boot the 2.1.2 ISO, you can arrange the system with setup-alpine and then install it to an internal disk with setup-disk.

But after reboot you need to add the online repositories to the /etc/apk/repositories file. In short,

or your attempts to install things via apk add will fall short. Use apk update to refresh your package lists, and then add xorg, xfce4, sudo and so forth, plus the xf86-video-vesa driver. And maybe even xf86-video-fbdev.

For the record, the xf86-video-intel driver wouldn’t run for me; X complained about kernel modesetting.

One more thing: Run X -configure to get a workable xorg.conf file, then edit it for the vesa driver. And I had to reach way, waaay back to 2008 for that AllowEmptyInput setting, or I got the infamous dead desktop that I hated so much.

That’s more or less everything you’d need, given that your hardware plays well with the Alpine superstructure. I’m lucky to have Intel-based network and video, so short of that video card problem I mentioned, everything was fine out of the box.

Start times are electric, jumping to the login prompt in a meager 13 seconds on my core duo. With Midori as a browser I rarely see the entire memory profile arc over 92Mb, even with two or three tabs open at a time. Firefox is overrated, you know.

But like I said, it shouldn’t surprise anyone — least of all me — that an embedded Linux does such a fantastic job keeping itself lean and trim. That is, after all, the point.

And even if this technically isn’t intended for ancient hardware, but you can probably guess what my plan is next. … 😈

as for your raeg towards intel driver, intel appearantly went on an obsolete binge. I Do know that ubuntu doesn’t support the 82845 GFX card once you update, which before worked fine in maverick, even the normally always broken plymouth worked perfectly.

and if alpine had a mode that didn’t run from ram I’d like to run that. I like my ram running distros, but tinycore dominates that. but I’d still give it a shot.

I’ve just tried this distro for a particular project. Alpine looked promising for my project because an older machine will be in use (P3 with only 128 MB RAM). Alpine ran pretty well and I didn’t find it terribly hard to set up–though I am a fairly seasoned Linux user. But in the end I couldn’t make use of Alpine. As you might expect it’s something of a crippled distro: the one application I really needed to run–vlc–was compiled to run without a gui (remote control mode), which was NOT going to work for my project. You see, I have clueless users who need pretty pictures in order to interact to some degree with the computer. And I’m not going to get involved in attempting to compile a complex program like vlc on this hobbled distro–sounds like an exercise in extreme frustration to me. A bit sad I couldn’t use it since it seemed just right for the job in all other respects.